Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist

Greenwood, right, and Thom Yorke during sound check before a Radiohead concert in Miami.Credit
Christaan Felber for The New York Times

On the morning of Sept. 12, 2011, a white Land Rover with a dragon on the door ferried the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, his longtime recording engineer Graeme Stewart and Radiohead’s co-manager Chris Hufford to Alvernia Studios, about an hour outside Krakow, Poland. For several years, when he’s not recording or touring with Radiohead, Greenwood has pursued a second career as a composer of orchestral music, and this day he was cutting new versions of two of his classical pieces, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” (17 minutes, inspired in part by the sound of radio static) and “48 Responses to Polymorphia,” both of which are unabashed tributes to the early-’60s output of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose compositions abandoned melody in favor of dense, dissonant tone clusters. Greenwood’s recordings will be featured on an album due out in March on Nonesuch Records, along with two new performances of Penderecki’s work conducted by Penderecki himself.

Greenwood cites an early-’90s concert of Penderecki’s music as a conversion experience; he’s obsessed with Penderecki the way a lot of people are obsessed with Radiohead. Chances are you’ve heard Penderecki’s music even if you think you haven’t; some of his more screaming-of-the-damned­ish pieces turned up on the soundtracks to “The Exorcist” and “The Shining,” and that’s his “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” seemingly ringing in Clive Owen’s ears during the long urban-warfare tracking shot near the end of “Children of Men.” So there was something full-circle about the Sept. 12 session, given that Greenwood owes his profile as a classical composer in large part to his work in film, particularly his deeply Penderecki-indebted score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.”

Alvernia Studios was founded in 2010 by the Polish radio mogul Stanislaw Tyczynski; it’s a full-service film production and postproduction studio that has six soundstages of varying massiveness. It is also a profoundly weird-looking place. This is because Tyczynski, in addition to being one of the richest men in Poland, is a huge fan of H. R. Giger, the Swiss artist/designer/night-terror-sufferer who’s most famous for creating the creepy biomechanical look of the aliens from the “Alien” movies. So nearly every inch of Alvernia has been modeled, at what looks like absurd expense, and with impressively bonkers disregard for the facility’s future resale value, on Giger’s work. All the hallways look like the birth canals of some extraterrestrial apex-predator with acid for blood. Even the men’s-room-door handles look like spinal columns. The complex itself is housed in 14 large domes linked by glass-enclosed tunnels; to get from one dome to another, you have to wait for a stone-faced, combat-booted security guard (no, seriously) to press his thumb to a keypad that opens a set of blast doors.

Yet as I sat in the control room (itself styled like the bridge of a doomed spacecraft) and listened as Greenwood and Graeme Stewart engaged in some “Lost in Translation”-ish negotiations with the Polish engineer at the mixing console — a stern woman in socks and sandals, with a sensible soccer-mom haircut — the studio’s bizarre aesthetic seemed appropriate for what they were doing on this day. “Dry and close and uncomfortable is good,” Stewart told the engineer. (He was trying to persuade her not to run the sound of the orchestra through a reverb unit called a Lexicon — “dry” in this context meant “unprocessed.”)

Greenwood tends to wince when he walks into a room, as if in anticipation of mortification to come. He was wearing a wrinkled white dress shirt; his black pants were tight but hung low on his hips; and his hair was a heedless mop. The overall schoolboy vibe was enhanced by the fact that he was still wearing his backpack, which contained a pinkish-orange T-shirt, a copy of the manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s graphic novel “Abandon the Old in Tokyo,” a MacBook and a spiralbound copy of the score for Pen­derecki’s “Polymorphia.” He’s 40, but he looks about 15; that’s roughly how old he was when he joined Radiohead, which makes me think back to someone who once suggested to me that when you join a band, you arrest at whatever age you were at that moment.

When we first arrived at the studio, Greenwood wandered onto the soundstage, where a 48-piece string orchestra was waiting, and just stood there quietly, listening to them tune up, letting the sound wash over him. He has never forgotten the first time he heard this sound — he was a teenager, trying out for a youth orchestra, and the minute he heard it, he felt as if all the recordings he’d heard had been keeping something from him, as if they failed to capture the true complexity and strangeness of these sounds, as if on some level he’d been sold a lie.

“There’s nothing like sitting in a completely quiet room, and then the strings start up,” he told me later. “It’s like when you go to the cinema — the first two or three minutes of any film are amazing. Because the screen is so big. The scale. Directors can pretty much do anything for those first few minutes. It doesn’t matter how many films you see — it’s still kind of a moment.”

On the soundstage, Greenwood conferred with the conductor, Marek Mos, a muscular guy in orange flared jeans and a black do-rag, then encouraged me to stay in the room while the orchestra played. I’ve never stood that close to a string orchestra before; it wasn’t even particularly loud, but my skull rattled in an interesting way. It was like listening to a cloud of hornets rapidly changing direction. For a minute or two, 48 musicians became a single, unified organism, controlled by Mos’s baton. When the take was over, it was like watching people wake from a trance; they were individuals again, free to cough and scratch and shift in their seats and adjust whatever had ridden up.

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Greenwood's stage setup for a Radiohead show.Credit
Christaan Felber for The New York Times

“I always obsess about each player,” Greenwood said. “It’s like a 48-piece band, and they’re all going to bring something to this. That’s what I can never feel comfortable with or get used to. It blows my mind a little bit.”

Accordingly, there’s usually a meta-aspect to the pieces Greenwood writes for orchestra. They’re about the idea of the orchestra and the idea of composition, as if he’s building the anxiety about composing into the composition process in lieu of getting over it. He wrote “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” by playing many of its expansive tone clusters on the viola, then manipulating those notes in Pro Tools, creating an orchestra of Jonny Greenwoods. The score for one section of “48 Responses to Polymorphia” is a picture of a purple oak leaf — the players all begin on a single note, then slide off according to the patterns of the veins on the leaf. “It’s me blowing a bit of smoke up Penderecki,” Greenwood said, “because he’s obsessed with trees. He’s got an arboretum.”

Later at this session, he would pass out maracas-like rhythm instruments — these 20-inch seedpods that grow on trees in Peru, lacquered and turned into something kindergartners can shake in music class — to each member of the orchestra; part of “Popcorn” involves the whole ensemble using these in lieu of bows, which makes the stringed instruments sound like extra­terrestrial war drums. Using something that grows on trees is also an in-joke aimed at Penderecki, Greenwood said, although it seemed less funny after “someone pointed out that a regular bow is already made of wood.”

The orchestra took a break for lunch. They’re all young — Greenwood told me later that they’re the most enthusiastic orchestra he’s ever worked with, that with British orchestras you get the sense that you’re taking the men away from their crosswords and the ladies from their knitting when it’s time to do a take — and some of them were clearly excited to be playing for a guy from a world-famous rock band. Some of them came over and said, “Thank you.” Some of them asked for pictures and said, “Best regards to Radiohead.”

There’s a long-if-not-particularly-proud tradition of rock musicians crossing over into the classical realm. In 1969, three years before “Smoke on the Water,” Deep Purple traded licks with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on “Concerto for Group and Orchestra,” helping pave the way for the high seriousness and bell-bottom Bach of ’70s prog-rock outfits like Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Paul McCartney released “Liverpool Oratorio,” the first of six politely received forays into notated music, in 1991. Elvis Costello recorded “The Juliet Letters” with the Brodsky Quartet in 1993; Billy Joel’s “Fantasies and Delusions,” a collection of surprisingly competent sonatas and waltzes written by Joel (who declared years earlier that he’d lost interest in pop songs) and performed by the piano man Richard Joo, came out in 2001.

Most of the time, these projects tend to reek of a please-call-me-William-Joel pretension — a quixotic yearning for high-cultural respect you’d think rock would have outgrown around the time Leonard Bernstein declared himself a Beatles fan. Sometimes they reek of plain old boredom — of legends, their Hall of Fame status assured, killing time between greatest-hits tours by knocking out a symphony.

Greenwood is an anomaly: a musician who made his name with a rock band and who is now embraced by the modern-music establishment as an actual, serious composer. The night before the Alvernia session, he was onstage in an aircraft-hangar-size room at a steel plant in Krakow, performing the minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” for an audience that included Reich himself, as part of a weeklong new-music festival, Sacrum Profanum. (Reich is a fan; he praises Greenwood’s decision to have the string section play with guitar picks on “Popcorn Superhet” as “the first new approach to pizzicato since Bartok.”) He wasn’t the only performer at Sacrum Profanum with pop-music credentials — the bill also included the techno provocateur Aphex Twin and Adrian Utley, from the trip-hop band Portishead. But he was the only guy from a superfamous rock band whose singer has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone.

And yet it makes sense: even as a superfamous rock band, Radiohead has always been atypical. Then as now, most British rock bands who have conquered their native country find the U.S. market tougher to crack; Radiohead broke in America first. When the debut album, “Pablo Honey,” was released in the U.K. in 1993, the tastemaking, gatekeeping British music newspaper NME called Radiohead “a lily-livered excuse for a rock band.” But before long, the band’s first single, a pseudo-grunge unrequited-love song called “Creep,” became a hit on American modern-rock radio and MTV. And if you want to understand how deeply mind-altering it must have been for the members of Radiohead — five guys from Oxford, England, many of whom had classical training or art school on their résumés — to hit the alternative-rock Lotto when and how they did, look up their 1993 performance at the MTV Beach House on YouTube.

It appears to be a slightly overcast day, as if the band had come across the pond with its own cloud cover. They’re playing on a wooden platform over a pool in which inflatable toys drift dejectedly. Greenwood appears to be wearing a kid’s pajama top. Thom Yorke is translucently pale, with a haircut that looks bully-administered; discomfort with the role of beach-party entertainer practically wafts off him in cartoon-skunk stink-waves, confusing the attractive, sweatshirted white teenagers in the audience and harshing their mellow; the fact that Yorke whispers the lyrics of the song as if they’re a curse he’s putting on their summer doesn’t help. The crowd goes wild whenever Greenwood plays the noisy up-and-down strokes on his guitar — sounding like a man trying to start a recalcitrant lawn mower — that lead into the chorus, but the rest of the time they might as well be watching a trout gasp for air on the deck. You get the sense that Yorke has never sung the lines “What the hell am I doing here/I don’t belong here” and meant them more.

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Greenwood rehearsing in Miami.Credit
Christaan Felber for The New York Times

They performed “Creep” at least twice that day, then encored with an impromptu rendition of the second single from “Pablo Honey,” “Anyone Can Play Guitar,” a venom-dripping sarcastic anti-anthem in which Yorke sings, “I wanna be, wanna be, wanna be Jim Morrison” like someone who really does not wanna be Jim Morrison at all. At the Beach House, he ad-libs “Fat, ugly, dead!” after the Morrison line, lest anyone miss the irony, then lets loose a few bloodcurdling screams directly into the camera. Then, as Greenwood and his fellow guitarist Ed O’Brien torture gales of feedback from their instruments, Yorke jumps in the pool. (His Dr. Martens immediately began to fill with water, and he had to be rescued from drowning by two MTV production assistants.)

But this was the quandary of every alternative breakout band born in the long shadow of Saint Kurt: You had to accept newfound bigness but find room within it to resist. Above all, you couldn’t seem as if you were enjoying it too much. Which wasn’t an issue for Radiohead. You can see the band getting bigger, and more miserable, in “Meeting People Is Easy,” a 1998 tour-souvenir documentary shot by Grant Gee. They’re on the road promoting the third album, the pretty-much-universally-fawned-over “OK Computer.” They’re packing larger venues; rock critics fluster and stammer in their presence. Yet the touring experience is portrayed as a grim, airless death march under fluorescent lights — lonely airport-tram rides, painfully awkward record-company grip-and-grins, inane interviews, live performances that punctuate but don’t alleviate the gloom.

Yorke seems more ill at ease than everybody else — honestly, he seems like someone who should not be left unsupervised in the presence of sharp things — but Greenwood isn’t exactly doing David Lee Roth jump-splits either. Most of the time, when you see him in the film, he’s usually bent over a guitar or a piano and hiding behind his hair. (He doesn’t like talking to cameras — throughout the session at Alvernia, a representative of the studio kept trying to pull him away to tape a five-minute Q. and A. for a video press kit, and he did everything he could to get out of it, short of faking a nosebleed.)

Radiohead insists to this day that the documentary leaves out the many unhorrible parts of this era. And that in general the film made them seem like bigger depressives than they actually are. But once the tour was over, the band — and specifically Yorke — started to make decisions that sort of beg to be interpreted as a band trying to renegotiate its relationship with its audience.

“ ‘OK Computer’ sent us on this bizarre trajectory,” Yorke told me. “I just wanted to get off.” Yorke found himself unable to write songs for a while; he retreated to Oxford, listened to a lot of experimental electronic music, particularly the paradigmatically blippy Warp Records catalog, and came back a year or so later determined to reinvent Radiohead. No more anthems. Rhythm over melody. Vocals supplying color and texture, not text. An overall aesthetic, borrowed from dance music, that would embrace the artifice of the recording studio instead of trying to conceal it. This kill-or-cure moment for the band stretched out into almost two years of hard labor in various studios — Paris, Copenhagen, Oxford. They were listening to Kraftwerk, Jamaican dub and ’70s Miles Davis; they were reading Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” (Yorke had become obsessed with the notion that by playing corporate-sponsored rock festivals in non-Western countries, the band had become hip advance men for globalization.)

The sessions were infamously fraught and doubt-ridden, which is interesting because the material they produced — enough for two albums, “Kid A”(2000) and “Amnesiac” (2001) — is fraught and doubt-ridden, too. It de-emphasizes the standard guitar-bass-drums format that has been rock’s default since the mid-20th century in favor of keyboards and weird time signatures and Charles Mingus-y brass and the hum and squelch of a not-O.K. computer murmuring to itself in the corner. It’s music that dramatizes the collapse of certainties at the dawn of the 21st century by forsaking the certainties of guitar-based rock. And yet, despite being executed with a toolbox of weird, theoretically hard-to-groove-to noises, these records were actually deeply traditional: a big, ambitious, where-we-are-and-where-we’re-going statement spread across double LPs, the kind we’ve always looked to “important” bands to make.

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It’s also worth pointing out that it’s pretty difficult for a band like Radiohead to draw a real line in the sand — the oddness of “Kid A” may have pruned a few casual fans from the band’s audience, but chances are most people who followed them from the worrying man’s Britpop of “The Bends” (1995) to the sprawling, spiny neo-prog of “OK Computer” weren’t about to jump ship the minute a drum machine came into the picture. Every generation of rock-music fans since the Beatles has needed a Beatles of its own, a band whose every creative left turn they can roll with, and congratulate themselves for rolling with. To generalize hugely for a minute, people like pop music (or any mass cultural experience, really) because it lets them feel as if they belong to something bigger than themselves. And they like avant-garde music because it lets them feel as if they’re part of something everyone else isn’t hip to. Going to see Radiohead play willfully difficult, electronically warped anti-anthems about rabbit-borne disease and human cloning in a venue the size of the Theater at Madison Square Garden satisfies both those needs; you get a sense of community and a sense of adventure for the price of a single admission.

A lot of lead guitarists would have struggled with a new direction that so pointedly and thoroughly marginalized lead guitar. Greenwood isn’t that kind of guitarist. He came into his own as a multi-instrumentalist. He taught himself to program modular synthesizers — the ones with the big switchboard-operator patch bays. He mastered the ondes martenot, an electric keyboard instrument from the 1920s that can mimic a string section, or a flute, or a choir of ghosts imprisoned in vacuum tubes. (It’s featured prominently on the French composer Olivier Messaien’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which Greenwood has said is his all-time favorite piece of music.)

Yorke had been sketching out ideas for the band’s Great Electronic Leap Forward at home on a cheap beatbox. “The sounds were all awful,” he says. “So it was good to have someone who was prepared to go out and spend money on all this wild, brand-new gear and come in and learn how to use it. That really helped us along, that he was willing to go straight into that.”

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Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist with a double musical life.Credit
Christaan Felber for The New York Times

That’s been Greenwood’s role ever since — he’s the guy who can take an abstract Thom Yorke notion and master the tools required to execute it in the real world. The most recent Radiohead album, “King of Limbs,” sounds as if it has less Greenwood on it than ever, until you learn that a lot of the music was pieced together using a bit of sound-looping software that Greenwood programmed. Post-“Kid A,” Greenwood says, Radiohead has evolved into a band of arrangers. They start with an idea — usually some chords, a melody and some kind of a speed — and figure out how to orchestrate it. Recording a song by playing it together in a room has become just one of several options they can pursue while recording: a setting on the machine that is Radiohead.

“Jonny likes having the ground pulled out from under him, musically,” Yorke says. “More than any of us. Which is a constant source of relief to me, because I’m the same way, but I don’t know how to get there, usually.”

“I think, were a stranger to come and watch us,” Greenwood says, “he’d be surprised how — not exactly amateur we are, but how uncertain, the whole time. There’s never that certainty, at the start of each song or project or piece of music, that it’s going to work. And that hasn’t changed.”

The other important thing about the move away from guitars was that it gave Greenwood the chance to work with an orchestra, writing the otherworldly string arrangements performed by the Orchestra of St. John’s on “How to Disappear Completely” from “Kid A” and “Dollars and Cents” from “Amnesiac.” According to Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s producer and de facto sixth member, the first time Greenwood put his charts in front of the musicians, “they all just sort of burst into giggles, because they couldn’t do what he’d written, because it was impossible — or impossible for them, anyway.”

In 2003, he composed his first film score, for Simon Dummell’s documentary “Bodysong” — some classical stuff, some guitar, some oddball hip-hop beats, even some honking, sideways jazz. It opened up doors and got him the residency at the BBC, during which he wrote pieces like “smear” (2004) and “Popcorn.” Elements of that last piece, which had its premiere in 2005, turned up in the score Greenwood wrote for “There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic film about the moral decay of an early-1900s oilman.

Greenwood, who went on to score movies like Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” and Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” is currently writing music for Anderson’s next film — an untitled period piece about a charismatic, L. Ron Hubbard-esque religious leader played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

When I ask Greenwood, who’s almost pathologically self-deprecating in conversation, how his initial collaboration with Anderson came about, he says, “Well, that was Paul getting this bootleg recording of the orchestral concert, putting it against the film and deciding to use it, and then asking for more written like that. So, yeah.”

Anderson tells the story a little differently. Even before he saw “Bodysong” at a film festival in Rotterdam, he says: “I knew there were arrangements that he had done within those Radiohead songs that obviously said he could do more than just play guitar in a band. And I thought, If the opportunity arises, I bet he could do something interesting on a film score. I was just sort of waiting for the opportunity.”

As for what Greenwood said about “Blood,” Anderson laughs. “Yeah — he likes to say that. And I like that about him. That’ll never be beaten out of him. It’s a lot of head-scratching and, like, ‘Oh, I really don’t know if I can do this,’ or, ‘No, I can’t do this,’ or even, y’know, ‘I just shouldn’t do this.’ And then the next thing you know, you have an e-mail with like, 45 minutes of music in your in-box, and it’s all amazing and wildly different and terrific. That’s kind of him in a nutshell: ‘No, no. I really can’t. I don’t know how to do this.’ And then you get this huge platter of stuff.”

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Credit
Christaan Felber for The New York Times

Although “There Will Be Blood” will probably be remembered by people who never saw it as the source of the goofy Internet meme “I drink your milkshake” — the way pop culture has reduced “The Shining” to “Redrum” and Jack Nicholson saying “Here’s Johnny!” — “Blood” is one of the great movies of the 2000s, a work of historical fiction that presents the lust for petrochemical riches as a kind of American original sin, and a horror movie with a human monster at its center, the prospector-turned-oil-baron Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). And Greenwood’s music is as crucial to the story as disco and “Sister Christian” were to “Boogie Nights.”

The first 12 minutes of the movie have no dialogue — we watch Day-Lewis digging for silver in a filthy hole while the strings from “Popcorn Superhet” shriek and buzz menacingly, establishing right away that we’re looking at elemental evil. Yet Anderson says that when he screened the sequence for Greenwood without music, “he was jumping up and down, saying, ‘Oh, you’ve got to do it that way.’ ” (The director eventually overruled his composer: “It really became a question of how European we wanted to get,” Anderson says.)

All told, Anderson estimates, Greenwood gave him about 90 minutes of new music for the movie. But because the final version of the score mixed that material with bits and pieces of “Popcorn” and a cut originally written for “Bodysong,” Greenwood’s work was ineligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, because of strict bylaws excluding “scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music.” (The rule was also famously invoked when the Academy was forced to withdraw the composer Nino Rota’s nomination for “The Godfather” in 1972 upon learning that Rota had recycled some music he wrote 15 years earlier for an Italian film called “Fortunella.”)

“Yeah, we got maneuvered out of the big one!” Anderson says. “I just wanted to see Jonny in a tuxedo. I would have paid top dollar for that.”

In the afternoon, Penderecki dropped by the studio. He’s 78, with a white beard and a grave, aristocratic mien. “He looks exactly like you want him to look,” Greenwood said, grinning. Penderecki and Greenwood conferred in a corner; later, when Penderecki left to go do meet-the-maestro photo-ops in another room, Greenwood handed his copy of the “Polymorphia” score book to Filip Berkowicz, the artistic director of the Sacrum Profanum, who coordinated the session. He asked Berkowicz to ask Penderecki to autograph it, then told him not to tell Penderecki it was his idea to ask. “Your idea, not my idea,” he said to Filip, then said it again, just to be sure.

“It’s terrible,” he said later to me, “to be star-struck by a septuagenarian Polish man.” This was the happiest Greenwood would look all day.

We talked over weird Polish cafeteria food in the studio canteen, which is so “Alien”-ish that I expected to see something mucusy and chitinous popping out of John Hurt’s chest at the next table. I asked Greenwood if he sees this as something he’ll be doing in his 70s, like Reich or Penderecki, instead of standing onstage with some geriatric touring-roadshow incarnation of Radiohead, and he said, “Oh,” almost disappointedly, as if the idea of classical composition as an appropriate post-rock afterlife had never occurred to him.

“To put it the other way around,” he said after a second, “I worry about being a fogy and just writing for orchestras. Like, really, I should be doing more electronic stuff, I feel. Laptops as part of the orchestra, and installation sound, and speakers.”

“It’s interesting that you feel that way,” I said to him. “Why the word ‘should’?”

“Because I strongly believe that you should use whatever technology you want, right up to the present day,” he said. “Though when it comes to orchestral music, whenever I see a concert with orchestra and strings, and I arrive and there are speakers up, my heart always sinks a little bit, and I think, It’s going to be down to some sound guy’s ideas. Contact microphones on the violins. I’m a purist, I suppose — I just want to get close to the instruments and not have anything in the way.

“When I saw the Penderecki concert in London, in ’92 or ’93,” he continued, “I thought there were speakers in the room. It was just strings. But I could hear these kind of buzzings and rumblings, and I was like, ‘Where is this all coming from?’ And that was just better, to my ears. Odder, stranger, more magical.”